since demised. Longer persons than Old Wirk had died, and much shorter
and much stouter persons than Old Wirk had died. But the coffin had
remained. Up-ended and neatly fitted with shelves, it served as a store
cupboard, without a door, pending its proper use. But it was a terribly
expensive store cupboard and it stood in Mr. Pinnock's parlour as a
gloomy monument to the folly of rash and hazardous speculation.


VI

Penny Green, like Rome, had not been built in a day. The houses of the
Penny Green Garden Home, on the other hand, were being run up in as near
to a day as enthusiastic developers, feverish contractors (vying one
with another) and impatient tenants could encompass. Nor was Penny Green
built for a day. The houses and cottages of Penny Green had been built
under the influence of many and different styles of architecture; and
they had been built not only by people who intended to live in them, and
proposed to be roomy and well cup boarded and stoutly beamed and floored
in them, but who, not foreseeing restless and railwayed generations,
built them to endure for the children of their children's children and
for children yet beyond. Sabre's house was of grey stone and it
presented over the doorway the date 1667.

"Nearly two hundred and fifty years," Mabel had once said.

"And I bet," Sabre had replied, "it's never been better kept or run than
you run it now, Mabel."

The tribute was well deserved. Mabel, who was in many ways a model
woman, was preëminently a model housewife. "Crawshaws" was spotlessly